The launch of two new features into the Open Compute hardware specifications on Wednesday has managed to do what Facebook has been threatening to do since it began building its vanity-free hardware back in 2010. The company has blown up the server — reducing it to interchangeable components.

With this step it has disrupted the hardware business from the chips all the way up to the switches. It has also killed the server business, which IDC estimates will bring in $55 billion in revenue for 2012.